ESR: Goodbye Fedora

[Steve Friedman]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:

> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 17:19:34 -0600,
>>   Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The one that matters is that fedora isn't suitable for machine that need 
>>> to be stable and reliable.  I've always thought that a quick, easy 
>>> solution to most surprises would be to let yum take a date/time option and 
>>> ignore all updates after that time.  That way you could stay almost up to 
>>> date on your critical machines while watching the mail list for complaints 
>>> by people with the newer changes.  And, you could update a test machine 
>>> and after testing, reliably update other boxes to the same versions that 
>>> you tested even if new updates had gone in the repository.
>> 
>> You'd probably want the time specified as an interval to lag, rather than
>> a date.
>
> That's trivial to compute, so it doesn't need to be part of the application. 
> What I really want are reliable, repeatable updates once I've done one and 
> tested on a non-critical box, and I'd also like it to play nice with a 
> caching web proxy.  Using a random pick from a mirrorlist every run screws up 
> both of those concepts, even if you could pin the timestamp of the last 
> update you want to consider.
>
>

The workaround for this feature is trivial.  We set up our own local 
repository (initially because updating a new config over the internet was 
so slow compared with ethernet speeds, but now we do it with installs and 
have eliminated swapping CDs).  Just push approved updates (instead of 
blindly rsync'ing the part of the tree that interests you), and you're 
done.

Steve Friedman